Shadows of Death
by Kilerkki
Summary: Uchiha Ryuu spent the morning of his twenty second birthday digging graves.


Shadows of Death

-

Okay, see, I _really _love minor characters. Characters so minor that most of you probably don't know their names. Uchiha Ryuu was the ANBU Dragon, captain of the ANBU Two Squad about 36 years before Naruto was born; he's also Uchiha Mikoto's father and thus Sasuke and Itachi's grandfather.

-

"_Alas, poor Yorick—I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy…"_

--William Shakespeare, _Hamlet, _V.I.

-

Uchiha Ryuu spent the morning of his twenty-second birthday digging graves. He'd grown numb in the night, his mind as cold and sluggish and deadened as the limp limbs sprawled over each other in a tangled mass at the edge of the clearing. He didn't look at them anymore when he tossed each shovel-blade of dirt over his shoulder, and even when he paused to catch his breath and rewrap the bloody bandages around his palms, he kept his eyes away from the leaden lumps of flesh and bone that would soon occupy his graves. Nothing to be done about them now, he told himself. Piled casually together, enemy and ally alike, they couldn't mind anymore; they had no dignity to lose.

That didn't keep him from imagining the expression on Tanabe's face when he found out Ryuu had dragged his body back to the clearing and dumped it unceremoniously on top of the corpse of his killer...

But digging did. So he dug, losing himself in the mindless bite of wooden shovel blade into the earth, the surge of back and shoulder muscles as he straightened, the heave as he tossed the load of earth to the side, the painful little stab in his side that soon lost itself in the routine as even sliced muscles and cracked ribs adjusted themselves to his movements. He finished one grave and pulled himself out of the hole and strode a measured three paces to start another, because even if they had no dignity to lose tumbled into one common grave, he'd nothing better to do.

Digging, he found, kept him from weeping.

­-

The rain came eventually, as it had threatened all morning. It drizzled down from the lowering grey clouds in silent mockery of the tears the ANBU would not shed, and it dripped from corpses' clay-cold limbs and filled the bottoms of Ryuu's graves and turned heavy shovelfuls of dirt to heavier shovelfuls of reddish mud. He shoved his Dragon mask a little further back on the side of his head (the rain made it slippery and inclined to slide forward over his wet-sleek hair) and kept digging.

He was shoulder-deep in his eighth grave when Shintaro hunkered down on the rim, thin and rain-grey and muddy to the thighs. A long slash across his ribs, puckering the stiff canvas of his pale grey vest, was still bleeding sluggishly. The Shrew mask was shoved precariously to the side of his head, and its sharp pointed nose dripped steadily with rain. Shintaro's eyes were dark, shadowed, and far too old for his thin, scarred face.

"We'll need one more," he said quietly. "Ryoma of One Squad just got back."

Ryuu paused for just a moment, shovel blade half-buried in water and muck. Then he stepped on the edge and threw his weight forward, and the blade sank juddering in. "Who?" he asked.

"The Hawk," Shintaro said, and then corrected himself. "Vice-Commander Gekkou Kensaki."

The shovel blade lifted free with a hideous sucking glop, a sick parody of a sucking chest wound or a heart torn out of its protective cage of flesh and bone. Shintaro rocked backwards as Ryuu flung the mud onto the pile at the grave's edge. "I thought so," he said, and thrust the blade in again. "He'd have been back hours ago, if he were still alive."

"Ryoma said he must have died around midnight," Shintaro said. A little angry roughness crept into his voice. "They got to his body first."

The blade sank a little deeper. Ryuu leaned on the shovel handle and did not look up. "Eight hours' start," he said. "What was left?"

"Enough to bury," Shintaro said, and the venom in his voice was as cold as the rain trickling down Ryuu's spine. "Ryoma tried to follow, but he lost the trail in the rain."

"No use following," Ryuu said, pulling the blade out again and heaving the load up out of the hole. "By now they'll be across the border." Drive the blade in, lift it out, muscles knotting and slipping over tendon and bone. Set teeth and ignore the cracked ribs and the burning side and the growing coldness in cramped fingers and feet sunk to the ankles in muck. Toss the mud over the edge of the hole and pause to cast a measured glance at the silent, stiffening pile of corpses at the edge of the clearing, not too far from the tiny knot of living men still tending each others' wounds and carefully avoiding any mention of each others' failures.

"We can't just bury them, then," he said quietly. "Too easy to dig up." And there was a Hyuuga among them; his family would not tolerate the potential lose of his Bloodline Limit.

Ryuu's heart was suddenly much colder than his fingers and feet and the bare shoulders turned to ice by the rain. He threw the shovel over the edge and heaved himself up out of the grave, and then he paused to pick up the shovel again and pass it to Shintaro.

"Keep digging," he said. "I'll do what needs to be done."

-

"We lost five men in all, sir," Ryuu said tonelessly, dark eyes fixed in not-quite-focus on a paler grain of wood running across the dark top of the Hokage's desk. "Hawk, Egret, and Heron of One Squad; Rat of Two Squad; Wildcat of Three Squad. We estimate that we killed at least eleven of the enemy, but we only recovered four bodies for burial." Three of the rest he'd incinerated himself, in brief savage bursts of flame hotter than any fire normal flint and steel could produce; Arima Watsuki of Three Squad, a distant cousin of the Hokage's, had taken out two more with tree jutsu so sudden and fierce that only scraps of flesh and clothing had remained on the foot-long thorns of the briar forest he'd summoned. Ryoma of One Squad reported that the former Hawk had killed at least two more, but the enemy force had taken the bodies with them when they'd fled.

"The ANBU Cardinal will report on the death of the Hawk, sir." He stepped back to give young Ryoma the floor. The boy's shoulders still drooped with exhaustion and grief, but he straightened them defiantly as the Hokage's tired dark eyes turned to him, and his voice rang out strong behind the Cardinal mask.

"We were separated during the fighting, sir. Egret went down and Hawk told me to stay with him while he went off with Heron. We were attacked again a short time later, and Egret was killed. I would have died if the Dragon and the Shrew hadn't found us and entered the fight. By then it seemed the enemy was retreating. The Dragon pulled us back to the clearing; we recovered our dead and as much of the enemy's as we could find, and found that Hawk and Heron were missing. Dragon sent me and Finch of Three Squad to find them. We found Heron about five kilometers away, and Finch took his body back while I went on." He faltered for the first time, then, but pressed on in a voice suddenly much younger than before. "I didn't find his body till shortly after dawn, sir. What was left of his body. They'd taken him apart pretty thoroughly, sir. I brought back what I could and we—we buried it."

"Thank you, Cardinal," the Shodai Hokage said quietly. "You're dismissed. Go get a shower and a good meal—and then bed, I think. You have leave for the next three days. Use to honor your team."

The boy glanced quickly at Ryuu before he bowed low and left the room. The Hokage didn't miss the glance; one eyebrow raised, and the corner of his mouth quirked a little in something that might have once been called amusement. Then his eyes turned back to Ryuu, and the ANBU stiffened a little despite himself.

"Dragon," the Hokage whispered, and the sound of his title sent a chill down Ryuu's spine. "You know what this means."

Ryuu nodded, short and sharp. "I…took care of the rest of the bodies," he said. "Their graves are marked, but there's no information to be gleaned from them."

The Hokage's eyes dipped to the hands fisted at Ryuu's sides, to the gloves that refused to return to pure black no matter how many times he'd washed them in the rain-swollen streams. "You did well," he said. "But the Hawk—"

Ryuu smiled beneath the Dragon mask, slow and sad and almost wistful in memory of a man he'd sometimes loved and sometimes hated and always respected almost as much as he respected the man in front of him now. "The Hawk knew," he said. "We managed to gather a little more information on the field. Not much, but enough to give the rumors of jutsu-stealing through corpse-research a little more credence. He didn't have much of the drug he used, but he had enough for himself when he knew the end had come. The cells were already self-destructing when I examined the remains. They'll get nothing from him."

"Not in life nor in death," the Hokage murmured, and even Ryuu's Sharingan eyes couldn't tell if that was the faintest hint of a smile on his lips. "He served Konoha to his last breath and beyond."

"He was the Hawk, sir," Ryuu reminded him. "It was his life."

_And his death,_ lay unspoken between them.

The Hokage sighed and turned his head a little, enough to stare out the window at the grey rain sheeting down. After a moment he said, "I'll need a new Vice-Commander."

"Yes, sir," Ryuu said quietly.

Shodai glanced up sharply. "You know I mean to chose you."

"I know," Ryuu said. "And I know you want me to say no."

"You're too young for this," Shodai said grimly, and pushed a scroll across his desk with an idle finger. It rolled to the edge and topped over, unrolling a few pale inches of kanji-sprinkled paper across the floor. "You're, what, two years older than that boy who was just here? Kensaki was ten years older than you when he took the position."

"When a ninja is taught to kill before he's learned to read," Ryuu said steadily, "there's no such thing as _too young._"

Now a sad, tired smile did tug at the corner of the Hokage's lips for half a second before he pushed it away. "Your friend Shintaro, I take it?"

"We cribbed off each other in the Academy." Ryuu lifted his shoulders in a light half-shrug. "Why stop now?"

The Hokage laughed. A tired laugh, a gallows-humor laugh seeing humor where only a man who's stared Death in the face too many times to be frightened anymore would see it; but it was a laugh, and it was a start. "You'll do well together in One Squad," he said. He paused, and lifted his eyes to Ryuu's again, face once more serious and drawn and worn beyond its years. "Take care of my ANBU, Uchiha Ryuu."

"I can't promise that," Ryuu said quietly. "But I can promise to serve them with everything I've got. And, at the end, to die with them."

"That's all I can ask," Shodai said. "That's all anyone can give."

Except for the Hokage, Ryuu thought, who gave far, far more.

And for whom Ryuu, and all the ANBU, had and did and would give everything.

-

Nineteen months later, watching his Hokage die, Ryuu had a few brief seconds to remember the Hawk. To remember the life he'd lived and the choices he'd made and the death he'd died, drawing his attackers so far away from the ragged remnants of the rest of his men that when they finally brought him down, they were too far to do more than crawl off to lick their wounds and snarl over their losses. To remember how the Hawk had served Konoha and his men and his Hokage in his life and in his death—

Just like Shintaro (_he never wanted to die in bed_) and Keiji (_he always said he was going to have three wives and eighteen children and a lover in every village_) and Natsuki (_no older than Ryoma was then, but he wanted to prove himself more than anyone)_.

Just like the Shodai.

And just like Ryuu, who knew now with startling clarity that the dreams he'd once dared to dream were never really more than ashes blown on the ephemeral breeze of his breath, and that life in the shadow of death is a fire that only burns a little brighter before it burns out.

But in that brief moment of burning, it's hot and fierce and bright enough to consume the world.


End file.
